ph_logs | [OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

[OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

Who: Jonathan Sims and YOU!
What: Open prompts for the end of summer!
When: August
Where: Around Marrow Isle
Warning(s): Cursed objects, potential descriptions of gore (More warnings pending)

1. Looking towards the future, we were begging for the past

With a sound of effort, Jon drops the last of the tools he'd been carrying too many of, letting out a winded wheeze as he tries to collect himself.

It's been quite an undertaking, collecting ins and odds from Calloway's Curios before they fell into hands, not knowing what they are or what they're capable of doing. He's not certain of the particular qualities of a few of these things, but he's seen enough things and read about even more to know when something is simply here to cause problems.

Sprucing up the unused shed behind his cliff-side home is proving to be even more of an undertaking, considering he isn't especially gifted at carpentry, but sometimes you've just got to make due.

He's so engrossed in his work that he doesn't notice the presence of anyone outside of Grimmly the Dusknoir, the large Pokemon lingering, watching with what can only be described as single-eyed skepticism. The red eye follows Jon as he moves to collect the scattered metal rods of the lock-system he'd purchased, once again trying to carry all too many things at once.

To say the least, he's far too distracted to notice anybody coming up the short path to his home - especially as, with his heavy carry load, he staggers, stumbles, and topples back, dropping the rods in a spectacularly-noisy explosion of parts around his person.

Grimmly bellows with strange, wavering, ghostly laughter, the mouth on his stomach throwing his upper half backwards, with no regard for the daggers Jon glares his way.

"Oh, laugh it up, you shit, very funny. You could be helping with this, you know, you've got two perfectly good hands!"

2. Well, we knew we had the good things

Amid all the bustle he's been dealing with recently, Jon manages to find time to write and hang a flyer on the bulletin board.

Seeking assistance from the technically inclined for a repair project.

I am in possession of three tape recorders, and need someone who could potentially lend me a hand with fixing the wiring within the machines, as well as potentially making their power sources able to plug into a wall outlet. The tapes are in pristine condition, and I will only need assistance with at least one recorder, though all three being repaired would be preferred. Offering a reward of 200B for assistance.

If interested, please contact me via sending stone or telephone. Thank you.

-Jonathan Sims

With a reward like that, it's clear he's pretty serious about getting these fixed. He'll answer just about any call about them - be it someone who's ready to help him fix these, someone with questions about them, or friends with concerns about the devices. (It may be easier said than done convincing him not to fix them, if one even could, though.)

3. But those never seemed to last (Closed to Neil and Martin)

After meeting Martin on the beach, Jon was in more of a hurry than he'd care to admit to get to Neil and confirm dinner plans. Everything's smoothly in motion, and as ridiculous as it feels, Jon's more excited about this than he can rightly recall having been in a fair bit.

He's never been an incredible chef, but he's gotten a handle on home cooking since arriving in town, and throws together a plan quickly enough to have everything just about ready. It only takes a short trip out to the markets to have the supplies for everything: lemon chicken (the citrus specifically chosen for the occasion), mashed potatoes, and supplies for a light salad, hopefully making for something of an exceptional welcome-to-town dinner.

The sun is only just dipping towards the horizon when he's wrapping up, and judging by a quick glance to the clock on the wall when a knock at the door rings through the house, Martin's at his most punctual that Jon's ever seen him. Maybe he's as excited about this as Jon is? (He surely hopes so.)

Leaning as close to the kitchen's doorframe as he can while not straying too far, keen to finish wrapping things up as quickly as possible, Jon doesn't hesitate to call out towards the front of the house.

"Come in!"

4. Oh, please just last (Wildcard)
Want this guy somewhere, sometime? Shoot me a PM here or on Discord to plot, or just go wild and drop something!

[EDITED EXTRA PROMPT]

5. Beneath the Watcher's Eye

The more time passes, the more Jon feels his resolve beginning to slip.

At first, it's simply accidental, compelling people for statements when they're not looking to share. It sustains him, he feels terrible about it, and there's another sore spot to try to navigate around on this cursed island. The more time that passes, however, the few statements that are offered by the call of his bulletin-board posts simply don't provide like they used to. More often, the fatigue hangs heavy on his bones, even without the work to wear him down. Thinking grows difficult, and simple ordeals feel as though they've gained ten new steps overnight.

He tries to fight it off; he really, truly does. The itch sinks deeper into his bones with each passing day, though - no amount of reading old statements or reading books on things that had happened in town scratch it.

There comes a point with all itches that you've simply got no choice but to scratch it.

He adds his flyer to the bulletin board once more, crisp and neat. Sending stone calls are acceptable, events that have happened within Pumpkin Hollow are valid pieces of information to offer, and anything of any magnitude will be heard. The net is as wide as he can possibly cast it.

Waiting for the net to fill is an impossible task, however. Despite himself, he begins to hunt.

His search doesn't have the physicality or brute force of a Hunter seeking prey - but in energy and approach, they're shockingly alike. He's patient, calculated, and mindful. He stays out late during the nights of shore leave from the Mipha's Grace,, finding new haunts to insert himself into. Restaurants, taverns, bustling public events, and coffee shops are his most frequent targets; if he finds the perfect candidate outside of one of those spaces wearing marks that are heavy enough, though, he won't be picky.

Once he finds scars adequate enough, he sinks into action. The approach is simple and polite: if there's too many people around, he'll ask to step aside. If it's a quiet space, he'll move to stand near, to sit across from, to linger by whoever he's got his eyes on.

And then, he'll speak. The supernaturally inclined feel static begin to build in their ears, and even those who aren't get a sensation of their own, unnatural and tingly, something akin a sleeping limb beginning to wake up.

"You have seen something great and terrible, something beyond comprehension. Tell me your story."

[Extra notes: this is my general prompt for Jon taking statements! You can play this any way you want to. If you want their CR to stay positive, your character can show up at his house and deliver their statement normally, talk afterwards, whole nine yards. For anyone who'd prefer negative CR, though, or want to have Jon take a statement but have characters who would keep that to themselves, put him wherever your character might be and have him compel it out of them!

Additionally, closed to close CR: characters are welcome to bust him compelling statements out of someone! He is doing it fully intentionally this time, and while he'll generally see himself out while emotions run high from the person he took it from, he can be caught by someone who knows what's happening. He won't target people he's friends or generally friendly with intentionally, but it can happen accidentally. Hit me with anything! \o/ ]

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A day to a week, and a viciousness wells to the loop that Jon didn't expect, but it hooks him deeply. This statement is looking like it could practically be ten of them, in and of itself. Jon's intensity pales in comparison to Phil's, but he doesn't reel away from it. He only presses harder.

"What did you do with that invincibility during the following February 2nds?"

"Anything I wanted. Everything I'd ever regret. Take the biggest dipshit you know and take all the consequences from him. What do you get, short of murder? You get me. I was the funniest guy in town as long as you didn't care about other people's feelings. I called Johnathan chubby, I kissed Mrs. Lancaster and Debbie when I bumped into them, mocked the couple from Cleveland, danced around the marching band, flipped off Old Man Jenkins, the homeless man, who later that evening would..." He chokes briefly, then shakes his head. "And of course I was a nightmare to Rita and Larry. And I used the reset to get information from Nancy Taylor and pretend like I knew her when she didn't know me. So I could sleep with her. I did that to a lot of people. For..."

Another breath. "Years."

He goes into all the detail he can, though it's been a long time. It's so easy to waste a day being lazy. All the money he blew on stupid shit, all the times he skipped work and either dodged or snarked at Rita, all the bar fights he started, the doors he peeked into, the people he talked to, the coffee he drank straight from the diner's pot, the hundreds of dozens of donuts he ate, all the people he slept with, the sports bets he'd make with the benefit of foresight, the games of Jeopardy and bowling and pool he'd win. It's a nightmare of hedonism, and he describes it like one; guilt, black and insidious, crawls its nauseating way up from his stomach and out of his throat.

"And of course... you know, you get... bored of one thing, so you move onto the next. You know, I--you don't realize how dangerous it is? Boredom. It's good for you sometimes. Sometimes nothingness is good. But it can get really dangerous. And the thing is... I was trapped in that small town, but I still felt like the world was infinite. I was infinite. I could do anything. Right? With enough do-overs, foresight, if you can figure out just the right thing to say, you can do and get whatever you want, right?

"In my boredom, I tried to... go for Rita. My associate producer, right? But she was too smart and too strong to go for a guy like me. She was always going to be. I tried, I really did." And he describes his attempts as much, an effort lasting months. "And I kept... bumping into this realization. I didn't want to face it, because I could tell what kind of revelation it was gonna be. It was gonna destroy me. My entire selfhood was flimsy and shallow. It was the wolf and I was the straw house. My world felt as powerful as the kingdom of Egypt, and here was the hand of God turning the rivers to blood and casting fire from the sky, get it?

"It became about more than just Rita. Because if I couldn't do this, it meant I wasn't free. It meant that I was trapped. And Punxsutawney, and myself, and this one single day was all I had, and it was all I was ever gonna have. Forever. For good. I was... just me, and I couldn't be anything else. And I had no real world to live in. I was banned from participating in a normal life; I had no life to live. No more sun. No more birthdays. No more shaving. No more new restaurants, or paying taxes, or watching the neighbors grow up and move, o-or voting, or... nothing. I had nothing. I was nothing. Everything stopped being real. I was trapped in stasis, just like a ghost. I was dead without dying."

His voice is shaking. He doesn't know why. Gritting his teeth, he leans forward, reaching to grasp Jon by the forearms. It's a good thing his talons are blunt.

"Boredom is dangerous because after you get bored, you get desperate. I told you, every morning, the sheriff drops his gun."

Edited 2024-08-13 22:44 (UTC)

"You took the sheriff's gun to try to escape the years of Punxsutawney you saw ahead of you."

Even at being grasped, Jon doesn't budge. When he's clear of this, he'll wish that he'd been able to, to at least show Phil that he sees his agony for what it is, that he knows where this winding road goes, that he can't think of anyone who wouldn't have done the same...

But he doesn't. He can't. Everything he is demands him not to do so; he simply stares right back into Phil's eyes, even as they grow ever-wilder, and Sees.

"But it didn't work, of course. Nothing did."

"It should've been obvious the first time. But like I said. I was desperate. In my mind, there was nothing else to try."

He doesn't know what it is about this, that makes the words slip out of him so easily; every other time he's done this he'd either skip over this or stutter and stop, choking on his own speech. This time, it feels like all he needs to do is tug on his memory, and the whole thing comes unspooling like a film reel.

Jon Sees, so Phil opens the window. He tells him what it feels like. Metal weights in your hands, sounds in your skulls, the warmth when skin splits. A thousand ways to poison yourself, a thousand ways to strangle yourself, burn yourself, bleed yourself like a pig, break your neck like the butcher with the chicken. Electricity, acid, fire, rope, gas, cleaners, all the sharp and blunt forces in the world. Screaming witnesses. All the repeats. Everything. And Phil Connors was dead-not-dead. And there was darkness, and the world was nothing. And he felt utterly, absolutely alone, because there was no one else who would ever remember, and no one who would ever believe him.

There's too much. There's too much. Once is too much, and this is far more. A terrible number. As he keeps talking, more memories keep appearing, sprung from a hole punched through his mind that he used to be able to live with.

Phil Connors is melting. He doesn't break eye contact with Jon, but at some point he starts weeping, and then he starts sinking to his knees to sit on the ground, gasping around an explanation that won't stop. He's Icarus and Daedalus, both the grieving and the grieved, damner and damned, and all of it is bared open for Jon to reap.

As the world crumbles down around Phil Connors, Jon doesn't waver. He's far too locked in; even as Phil sinks to his knees, Jon sinks with him, bearing down upon him with the oppressive weight of a staring crowd. The tide of calamitous everything rises faster and faster, pouring forth in a destructive crescendo.

And reap it Jon does.

If a stranger had seen the exchange before, it could have been easy to mistake everything Jon got from this rendering him almost a new man. Before, he'd looked exhausted, disheveled, gaunt, with a laser-focus that could have easily been chalked up to the overcompensation of someone running on fumes. Now, he is renewed; life has been breathed back into him, and all it took was bathing himself in this man's blood.

How easy it is, to take what you need, then ignore the blood on your hands, so long as it never truly leaves your victim.

Even still, the statement hasn't ended. He continues to press.

"Eventually, you surely ran out of these escapes. These deaths that no one would ever grieve, because they did not exist. Not to anyone but you," Jon says, low and direct, cutting at whatever lies deeper within. "What is left when boredom, cruelty, and destruction finally run dry, Mr. Connors?"

Edited 2024-08-20 11:01 (UTC)

The answer doesn't come quickly. He's too busy spilling all his guts out on the cobblestones first. He can only sit there sobbing, heartbroke and inchoate, laid out for Jon's vivisection.

Words only form when the grief shrinks just enough for Jon's pull to budge it. This part--this part is better. Kinder. "It was Rita who knocked my head on straight. If it hadn't been for her, I don't... honestly, if, if I was gonna start, I don't know--doing... really... really criminal things, I probably would've. By then. But. You know. You just can't shake the feeling. That if I'd just been stuck like that for long enough, then something even bigger in me would've snapped. I've always felt that... urge, to hurt myself, since I was a kid. You know? Happens to people. And I'd gotten into hundreds of bar fights, but the idea of really hurting someone else never crossed my mind, but, hah, the, the word of the day is eventually, right? I'd already convinced myself that nobody else was really real. Sort of like a video game. And people are really thoughtless in video games. But I guess it's different when it's not a controller, it's your hands, and... aha. Ha."

Phil scrubs at his face. He doesn't usually throw that in there when he tells this story.

"But Rita set me straight. I don't know what I did that day to make her act differently, but she pushed me to explain why I was acting so weird all day--ha, all day--and, um, I told her. I had nothing to lose. I recited all the conversations in the diner and named everyone and facts I knew about them to prove it. And she didn't really believe me. So I stormed out. She followed me and demanded to know what kind of trick I was pulling. I told her things about herself, things I shouldn't have known. And I told her about how miserable I was.

"And obviously she still didn't believe me, but she's... so, so nice. She was always way too smart for me, and part of that was that she still decided to humor me. Because she saw that whatever was going on, I was still suffering. So she dragged me around Punx all day, to all these--silly small town festival things and carnival rides, and told me all about the things she'd do if she had the kind of time I had. Things like studying math, and running over hills, and just... pursuing interests. I guess. And. Being nice. You can imagine what kind of guy I was that I'd never thought of that before." He pulls a face.

"I can't say I was all that interested in any of it at the time, but I had nothing else to try. So I tried it. And I wasn't, hah, that good at it, being nice to people and things like that, but I was trying, and the Punx people were... honestly, really receptive of that. You'd be surprised how much grace people give you when they can tell you're trying. Of course, sometimes it's none at all, but sometimes they'll really try to help. I said hi to Johnathan like, uh, like a mostly normal person, and tried not to make snide comments at Mrs. Lancaster or the couple from Cleveland. I got pastries and coffee for Rita and Larry, even. And. Stuff like that. I spent a lot of years like that, being nice and polite and discovering the different ways they'd treat me. And how differently I started to see them.

"It's, uh, kind of... kind of amazing, what little it actually takes for that to happen. Nowadays I look back and I have no idea how I'd never thought of it before. I don't know how I got that far living the way I did. It was fucking miserable in retrospect. Not the loop, before it. I hadn't had a real friend in over 20 years--at some point you have to stop and think, Jesus, how did I waste so much time? Doing and being... nothing?"

"You spent so much of your life seeing people as means to an end. Set dressing in your story as absolute most," Jon remarks. Such words would often come as derisive, judgemental - but he only says them as simple fact. "It's a fragile state that you took great lengths to reinforce for as long as you could. All it took was one person refusing to play the part to realize that they weren't."

Edited 2024-08-26 18:41 (UTC)

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[OPEN] While we're on the subject, could we change the subject now?

no subject

cw just icky asshole behavior + later discussion of suicide

CW: continuation of discussion of suicide

CWs continue; injury, death, references to animal butchering

no subject

cw mention of self harm, mention of murder

(sorry this is so late/so short in comparison orz)